Moonlight and Merlot

The continuing saga of the lives, loves and heartbreaks of the residents of Dion Valley, CA.

As with all the best things in life, this is for adults only.

*****

Lela sat up in Nick’s bed, gazing out the window, watching the sun go down. Nick slept peacefully beside her, the sound of his breathing a gentle, pleasing rhythm in the otherwise quiet night.

Tomorrow she would perform the spell she had been waiting what seemed like a lifetime to do.  A sliver of excitement rolled down her spine in a pleasant wave and Lela smiled.  The spell. The power to call a god. For some reason from the moment she found it in one of those old volumes way back in the furthest dusty, dark corner of the Dion Valley Library archives, she never doubted it would work. Never doubted that it wasn’t the right thing to do. Never doubted at all.

But now she wondered.

Why did it seem so perfect? Why was it so right? Why was she even doing it?

At first, revenge had seemed like a good answer to those questions.

Revenge on the small, ignorant, prejudice, judgmental, forsaken town that always been her home but had never been her home. The town that rejected her just because of her last name.

Everyone knew who she was. Everyone knew that she was total white trash in every sense of the cliché right down to her own unidentifiable father, the jailbird step-daddy, the mother that couldn’t keep off the bottle. It was impossible to hide in a town the size of Dion Valley where families went back generations upon generations and everybody knew everybody else. She would never be accepted, not as long as she stayed. Sleeping with Zach had been one of her earliest forms of rebellion, of sticking her finger in the eye of the establishment, but  she wasn’t stupid, she’d known back then that it would never work out, that they were from two very different worlds and such worlds may meet briefly in the bedroom, but never, never outside it.  Never in public where people could see.

Vengeance against all of them, for every slight, very look of distaste, every insult both perceived and real, was a good thing. A right thing. A wonderful thing.

Or so she thought.

But maybe she was wrong. Or maybe not wrong exactly, maybe more like… mislead. She had no real reason to feel that way, no solid proof of anything being amiss, just the ever present, itchy, icky feeling that something was not right, that there was something missing. Forgotten. Wrong.

And she did not like that feeling. Not at all.

And so she wondered. Wondered and wondered and wondered as the moon rose in the darkening sky.

[Until next Tuesday…]

*****

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